The advent of Artificial Intelligence has put the idea of extinction into quite a few minds recently. For some it is the extinction of the human race, but for photographic artist Hiroshi Sugimoto it has another aspect — namely the eclipse of analogue art by digital product, a concern that is at the heart of his new "Extinction" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The show also acts as a major retrospective of his career. In a recent interview, Sugimoto discussed these themes with Yoichi Ochiai, a prominent academic and media artist who creates works that explore the limits of digital art.
Contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto and media artist Yoichi Ochiai share a resonant sensibility. Starting from objects spanning East and West, past and present, the two engage in an intellectual dialogue about the origins and future of human history, and the possible extinction of photography as a medium. Though of different generations, they share many overlapping worlds—photography, art, Buddhism, Shinto, the tea ceremony, etc. They have long known of each other but have never spoken at length until recently, when they finally sat face to face in a tea room in Tokyo. Entering a space where Sugimoto’s collection of antiquities was displayed alongside his own works, Ochiai’s gaze was drawn to the hanging scroll in the tokonoma and to an object that looked like an optometrist’s trial frame.
Sugimoto: The hanging scroll is an 18th-century French anatomical plate. The depiction of the eye muscles being peeled away is truly “scales falling from the eyes.”
Ochiai: It’s a medical text for students of the time, remounted as a hanging scroll.
Sugimoto: The object is a brand-new piece for the current exhibition—still warm from the workshop. Together with the sculpture I’m using as its base, it will form the finale of the show.
Ochiai (putting on the glasses-like object): It has a shutter and actually works. That’s fascinating.
Sugimoto: It’s a brain-based camera apparatus. You wear it and spend three minutes in complete darkness, then press the release to open the shutter and see the world for just one second. If we take that one second as a human lifetime of about 85 years, the three minutes correspond to 15,000 years. It’s a device for experiencing that sense of time—a kind of simplified “life flashing before your eyes.”
Ochiai: Do your ideas about time, like this piece, grow out of "conversations" with the antiques and curios that surround you?
Sugimoto: When I look at old objects, they start talking to me, and I begin thinking about time. This stone tool is about 220,000 years old. When you hold it, the sense of the hands of people from that era comes back to life. It’s comfortable to grip, isn’t it?
Ochiai: It fits the hand perfectly. You can feel the process of evolution through your skin.
Sugimoto: By around 150,000 years ago they become tools capable of stabbing animals or skinning them. By 12,000 years ago—closer to our own civilization—the precision increases still further. With this one you might even have been able to fillet sashimi.
Ochiai: It’s well worked and highly precise.
Sugimoto: This one is a stone tool from Japan’s Jōmon period, yet very similar pieces have been excavated in Africa. Direct contact between the two places is hard to imagine, so it’s mysterious that they took such similar forms.
Ochiai: Japanese arrowheads have barbs; the African ones don’t.
Sugimoto: I sometimes wonder whether information suddenly “descended” into the human brain on a cosmic scale and triggered the change. Stone tools and pottery that don’t return to the earth are like time capsules. They make me imagine some transcendent revelation that may have been lurking in the missing links of human history.
Ochiai: Humans kept moving in search of food and continued making hunting tools. So it’s possible that the original information simply propagated over long periods of time.
Sugimoto: Or perhaps each group evolved independently in the same direction.
Ochiai: That’s possible. If you separate two groups and leave them for a thousand years, they might each begin making their own inventions.
Sugimoto: Even though almost everything in the world can now be processed as data, physical reality still yields discoveries. In the 1990s I used to spend whole days in the map room in the basement of Yaesu Book Center searching for locations for my “Seascapes.” Looking at roads and contour lines on topographic maps, I’d hypothesize: the moon rises from here, so if the elevation difference is about this much, standing in this spot should give me a chance. The map would rise up three-dimensionally in my mind. It was a completely analog, hit-or-miss method.
Sugimoto: It's a sense of time different from vision or hearing. In a dog’s memory the old and the new exist simultaneously—yet can it still tell them apart? "Over that way is the scent of the bitch I was dating last year," and so on (laughs). By the way, as AI advances, its capacity for attack will also rise, won’t it?
Ochiai: I think of it more as the sensation of things "going moldy." There’s a term, "digital nature." It’s like leaving a window open and flies coming in. If you leave a smartphone alone, dangerous things constantly infiltrate it. The whole world is heading toward becoming more easily corrupted.
Sugimoto: Once something like a "cyber air raid" becomes easy to launch, one starts thinking in apocalyptic terms. (Note: High-altitude nuclear detonations can generate Electo-Magnetic Pulse effects capable of damaging or disrupting electronics and electrical systems over wide geographic area)
Ochiai: If that exploded over a city, the entire information infrastructure would be wiped out and society could revert overnight to a kind of "Neolithic" state. That’s precisely why it’s important not to depend solely on the online world and to keep data in physical form—paper, hard disks, whatever—always backed up offline.
Sugimoto: What if cyber-attacks chained together on a global scale?
Ochiai: I don’t think of it as "ending" so much as "changing." A sense that the world becomes a little more black-and-white. The colour-saturated consumer society might quiet down a bit. Even a convenience store as vivid as a forest might start to look somehow fossilized. That kind of shift interests me.
Sugimoto: In that case, extinction might turn out to have an unexpected savour of its own. I finally obtained permission last year to photograph dioramas that had been off-limits for decades. After fifty years the series is at last complete.
Sugimoto: If AI does all the work and humans only play and sleep, where exactly is the difference between evolution and degeneration?
Ochiai: What will humans do? Will artists themselves become AI-ized?
Sugimoto: You’re already using AI to make works, aren’t you?
Ochiai: I feel more as if I’m domesticating AI as a tool. Bipedal robots are also increasing; they’ll probably start helping with installation work on site.
Sugimoto: In another twenty years or so, robots may respond to an artist’s instructions.
Ochiai: If you tell an AI "make a work in the style of Hiroshi Sugimoto," something comes out, but the resolution of feeling is still low.
Sugimoto: It will never be better than me, and it can’t produce that hazy flavor. In the "Theaters" series, for example, there’s the blur that appears while the film is being exposed, the interference of light… Digital information, no matter how fine, is unsuited to long exposures; strange noise appears.
Sugimoto: Art is the making of hypotheses. The important thing is that the hypothesis itself feels interesting.
Ochiai: Savour and interest, then.
Sugimoto: You form a hypothesis—"If I think this way, what becomes visible?"—and let predictions circulate. What I have been doing all along is using photography as a virtual space in which to think about the beginning of human consciousness and the consciousness of time. Being a photographer is merely a provisional guise one adopts while moving through the world.
Translated from Japanese by Tokyo Metropolis
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